Why use anything other then SMPlayer?

English Soapbox
#1

Thought this would be soapboax worthy, instead of the polls/survey’s forum.

I used to have mainly 2 reasons for booting windows, 1) Games, 2) Windows Media Player Classic.
This is because any mediaplayer I tried under linux seemed to have on the following disadvantages compared to WMC:

  1. No option to jump to a chapter*]Not able to handle subtitles properly (heavily styled ones in a mkv container especially)]Doesn’t support segment linking]Not enough configuration options to tweak image quality*]No option to select audio track used*]A decent interface*]Lack of customizing keyboard/mouse shortcuts
    SMPlayer it all, hell it seems to be the one out of two applications that use my mouse’s thumbbuttons (the other is firefox).
    Only options I’m still missing is being able to move a chapter trough a single mouseclick, but setting the mousebutton to skip 10 seconds and spamming it 6 times for each minute does the trick.

So what is everyone else using, and more importantly why?

#2

Axeia wrote:
> Thought this would be soapboax worthy, instead of the polls/survey’s
> forum.
>
> I used to have mainly 2 reasons for booting windows, 1) Games, 2)
> Windows Media Player Classic.
> This is because any mediaplayer I tried under linux seemed to have on
> the following disadvantages compared to WMC:
> - No option to jump to a chapter
> - Not able to handle subtitles properly (’ heavily styled ones in a
> mkv container’
> (http://www.matroska.org/technical/specs/subtitles/ssa.html)
> especially)
> - Doesn’t support ’ segment linking’
> (http://www.mod16.org/hurfdurf/?p=8)
> - Not enough configuration options to tweak image quality
> - No option to select audio track used
> - A decent interface
> - Lack of customizing keyboard/mouse shortcuts SMPlayer it all, hell it seems to be the one out of two applications
> that use my mouse’s thumbbuttons (the other is firefox).
> Only options I’m still missing is being able to move a chapter trough a
> single mouseclick, but setting the mousebutton to skip 10 seconds and
> spamming it 6 times for each minute does the trick.
>
> So what is everyone else using, and more importantly why?
>
>
VLC because it is cross platform and plays everything I’ve thrown at it.

#3

I tried VNC again recently as I was curious to its resource use, turns out it uses the same amount of RAM/CPU as smplayer.
It does things like the screenshot below to my subtitles (SMPlayer on the left, VLC on the right)
http://thumbnails12.imagebam.com/2466/947d2524655621.gif](http://www.imagebam.com/image/947d2524655621)
Seems a bit dodgy with hardware acceleration to… if it’s not enabled the screen shows ghost images and square pixely things, if it’s enabled the background is flickering with red squares if I’ve kwin effects active at the same time.

#4

That is very odd, I’ve never seen vlc do something like that. Perhaps the wrong font is being used for captioning.

#5

I use the default GUI of mplayer, which is small, fast and not cluttered with thousand options. It suits my needs very well

#6

Kaffeine can open a DVD iso image directly (File>Open>DVD ISO IMAGE in the file type selector). I couldn’t do this in SMPlayer without mounting the image.

I also miss OSD info when shifting subtitles with keyboard shortcuts.

Besides that, it’s great. It even plays rmvb and mov (after some tweaking).

#7

It can. Open->File, and select the iso file.

BTW, the current version from svn includes also experimental support for DVD menus.

Options->OSD->Seek bar. After that it will display some messages in the OSD, including info when the subtitles change.

#8

Options > OSD > Time + Total Time

From what I can tell it should support ISO’s, but I can’t test it as I don’t have any ISO’s besides those of openSUSE 11.1

EDIT
What the… Look’s like I’m being captain obvious here, didn’t see rvm4000’s post for some reason.

#9

@rvm400

Right on both counts, thanks!

I guess I haven’t checked those in the new versions, been using smplayer for some time. Livin’ n’ learnin’…

#10

SMPlayer is indeed a very nice frontend for MPlayer and for me it’s great where VLC performs too slow (happens quite often with x264 MKV videos on my 1Ghz CPU) and displays subtitle styles incorrectly.

But VLC still remains my number 1

#11

x264 is NOT a video format. It is an encoder which implements the H.264 video standard jointly developed by the MPEG and ITU groups (which call themselves JVT). Do not confuse an encoder which produces H.264 video with the video format itself. There are many other H.264 encoders out there, most notably MainConcept, DivX7, Nero Digital, Elecard, QuickTime, etc…

Some people are so wacked in their head that it’s beyond believe. We had a guy in #x264 on IRC who claimed that x264 is the video standard, even when pengvado, me and Dark Shikari told him multiple times that this is not the case and that x264 is an ENCODER which IMPLEMENTS the H.264 standard. pengvado and Dark Shikari are the two main developers of x264. As he was such a wacko, he got kicked and banned for spewing crap…

#12

What exactly is so great about it that makes you like it even though (S)Mplayer works better?
Are you sure btw it’s not a settings thing that would make VLC slower for you? From the very limited testing I did SMplayer and VLC had the exact same CPU and RAM usage.
Badly timed screenshot … badly timed, since I couldn’t get the video’s in exact sync and vlc does use 1% more then smplayer there… but that’s a sync problem.

#13

both VLC and MPlayer should perform the same as both of them use the same libraries to decode audio and video - libavcodec and libavformat from ffmpeg

#14

microchip8

I meant MKV videos using the H.264 codec, my mistake.

Axeia

Believe it or not, VLC performs very bad for H.264 videos on my PC; the video keeps hanging, I’m getting distorted pictures, etc. Both are using the XVideo output module and changing it for VLC doesn’t make a noticable difference.

I’ll have a look at the CPU usage and see if there actually is a difference and post screenshots if so.

(S)MPlayer plays the videos even smoother than Zoomplayer so there goes the need for me to switch to Windows to watch certain videos :-).

A few reasons why VLC is my #1:

  • It can play almost any file while the application itself is very small
  • It has Shoutcast support
  • Simple interface
  • Development is very active & forum support very satisfying

One more thing I really like about (S)Mplayer is that it doesn’t display distorted pictures which happens a lot in VLC.

Edit: here’s an example of a file that plays fine in (S)MPlayer but not in VLC for those who are interested:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=H455R915

#15

to be honest, IMO, VLC is really a bad player. It’s very good for streaming and such but it’s a mess when it comes to playing files locally. It often hangs, distorts pictures and underperforms in various situations. I’d rather use Xine than VLC

#16

Ah, I’m not the only one then :slight_smile:
Thought I did something wrong as I noticed a ton of distortions on nearly all my files with VLC.
I use Amarok 2 for shoutcast (though I hardly ever listen to shoutcast) and I like the smplayer interface since it’s so similar to the WMC one.

#17

Good to see this thread.

I also love smplayer and have set it to be the default application for all my video and multimedia files.

I despise the ugly, buggy, and flaky kaffeine. I never could and still can’t figure out how, it ever became the default player, or how it remained the default player in KDE.

For several years now when installing SuSE/openSUSE there are only two things I mark as taboo never install, beagle and kaffeine. No sure which of the two I dislike more, but kaffeine never makes it into an install on any system I set up.

Smplayer is outstanding and I would love to see it or perhaps Kmplayer be the default multimedia application.

Kaffeine just sucks in comparison.

#18

C’mon, VLC is not that bad, it has some distortion issues but they are not THAT bad… (as long as your CPU can handle it), next to the distorted videos it also doesn’t display some subtitles correctly for MKV files but even that issue is not a big one.

I’d like SMPlayer more if it integrated the MPlayer backend into its code so that the MPlayer frontend is left out.

#19

VLC performance may vary, one reason to use it, is to play downloaded flash files. Some versions of it had issues for me, others appear to solve them.

Kaffeine seemed to get fixed.

SMplayer has been the most reliable one for me, the only reason to use something else might be the name… SM player sounds kinky!

#20

SMplayer, plays flv files.

If you have have player installed just clicking on an .swf file should open the file in the flash player